Friday, March 31, 2017

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Rutger Bregman writes that the most extreme wealth in our economy is based on rents rather than productivity:

In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the
cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They
are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share
of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their
wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts
are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous
dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even
for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.

To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two
ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means
tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic
terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding
cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create.
Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.

But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way:
by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land,
knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet
profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at
others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.
...
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just
concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may
explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing
cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and
ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more
powerful.

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn
down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies
tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make
rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest
freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly
distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system
of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.

But such a revolution will require a wholly different
narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the
old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that
deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of
society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working
people what they deserve.

- Nora Loreto reminds us of the potential for public-sector competition such as a postal bank to rein in the abuses of the private sector. And Joe Allen discusses the potential for the logistics sector to be a new organizing opportunity for workers.

- Ilona Dougherty is rightly concerned with the prospect that an entire generation of workers is being told that it can't expect anything more than precarious work, while Murray Dobbin comments on the increasing stress and despair within the working class. Alexandra Sienkiewicz reports on the abuse of "part-time" classifications to suppress wages and benefits. And Frank Graves and Graham Lowe discuss what we'd see in workplaces which were actually intended to be smarter - rather than merely being more exploitative.